The only thing those people are signalling, in my opinion, is that it doesn't take much to bait people into engaging with reddit to give them traffic, can't wait for an article about how metrics are going up so investors have nothing to worry about.
Investors aren’t idiots. Advertising is a major draw for investors if the subscription model isn’t great. A site that serves millions of views of fuckspez isn’t attractive to advertisers.
You might of had a point of investors being able to look the other way during tech bro funding time, but a lot of the free cash has dried up. Reddit has to convince Betty Crocker that their platform is a great place for cake recipes. If everything goes “ ¼ sick of butter, 2 eggs, 1 pound of fuckspez.” They’re going to have a really hard time driving that point.
This is why it seems all the social media platforms are flying apart at the seams here. Pretty much all of them were flying high on the free to low interest cash. Now that a lot of them have to justify things for every penny and nickel they want, they’re realizing they didn’t have a great model to begin with and are hoping users will snap in place with the new “paradigm”.
But that’s the thing. Employees snap because their check relies on it. A lot of users don’t snap the same for the reason that lot of them just use social media as an outlet. Which for the users that are using these platforms for a source of income/word of mouth, they’re just watching this conflagration in tears.
I have the sinking feeling that they don’t care if anything is sustainable. They just want the IPO to happen with the highest inflated numbers then run away as soon as possible, leaving the whole thing burning behind them. It’s not about marking Reddit successful again, it’s about getting rich fast.